[linux-lvm] exposing snapshot block device
Gionatan Danti
g.danti at assyoma.it
Wed Oct 23 11:08:37 UTC 2019
On 23/10/19 12:46, Zdenek Kabelac wrote:
> Just few 'comments' - it's not really comparable - the efficiency of
> thin-pool metadata outperforms old snapshot in BIG way (there is no
> point to talk about snapshots that takes just couple of MiB)
Yes, this matches my experience.
> There is also BIG difference about the usage of old snapshot origin and
> snapshot.
>
> COW of old snapshot effectively cuts performance 1/2 if you write to
> origin.
If used without non-volatile RAID controller, 1/2 is generous - I
measured performance as low as 1/5 (with fat snapshot).
Talking about thin snapshot, an obvious performance optimization which
seems to not be implemented is to skip reading source data when
overwriting in larger-than-chunksize blocks.
For example, consider a completely filled 64k chunk thin volume (with
thinpool having ample free space). Snapshotting it and writing a 4k
block on origin will obviously cause a read of the original 64k chunk,
an in-memory change of the 4k block and a write of the entire modified
64k block to a new location. But writing, say, a 1 MB block should *not*
cause the same read on source: after all, the read data will be
immediately discarded, overwritten by the changed 1 MB block.
However, my testing shows that source chunks are always read, even when
completely overwritten.
Am I missing something?
--
Danti Gionatan
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